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This year's Glastonbury Festival could be the last
By This is London 15.02.08
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Emily Eavis has raised doubts about the future of the Glastonbury festival.
Michael Eavis's daughter, who has helped her father run the event for the last eight years, said the pair had discussed over Christmas the shelf life of the world-famous live music festival.
She said they were treating this year's 38th festival, which will be headlined by rapper Jay-Z, as though it were the last.
Asked whether Glastonbury has a limited time span, she told Orange World: "Yeah I probably do to be honest.
"We had a kind of retrospective time during Christmas, talking about it and whether it's a long term thing.
"I kinda feel that we should ply everything into this as if it be the last.
"It's a risky, risky business and it would be nice to think, to know that it could go on forever, (but) I don't know if that's possible."
Her father, who founded the festival, which is renowned for eschewing commercialism, recently said he wanted to attract younger people because Glastonbury had become "too middle-aged" and "respectable".
Last year, fans snapped up 137,500 tickets in a record time of one hour and 45 minutes when they went on sale.
The first Glastonbury was held in 1970, a day after Jimi Hendrix died, for the ticket price of a £1, which also bought free milk from the farm.
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Reader views (1)
Eavis is crazy if he thinks attracting a younger audience will make Glastonbury less commercial - quite the reverse in fact! If he wants to make it less commercial why doesn't he stop booking stadium bands to headline every year? Because that wouldn't attract the "younger audience" he says he wants! He can't have it both ways.
Glastonbury used to be about so much more than just the music, but each year that which made Glastonbury unique is being slowly worn away, as Eavis tries to copy Download, V T in the Park and all the other festivals that used to try and copy Glastonbury.
As a result, Glastonbury has become a sorry shadow of it's former self with huge crowds of dumb mainstream music fans herding around like sheep and going to bed at midnight. They don't even drum the night away in the Sacred Space and cheer the sunrise any more. Time to put it out of its misery.
- Jaz Needham, Southampton UK
